Body Check: System by System

[Adam's Apple]

Body Check
By Shari Rudavsky, The Indianapolis Star
December 13, 2005

It's your body, and you've got just one. Cars, kitchen appliances, even hair dryers and irons come with user manuals. Not our bodies.

Here are some quick hits of the closest thing to a medical consensus on what you need to know and do to keep your body as healthy as possible. Keep in mind, though, that not all doctors agree on what screenings should be done and how often. This, like the owner's manual you keep in your car's glove compartment and rarely consult, is just a general guideline.

Heart
What You Can Do: Exercise regularly and watch your weight. Avoid foods high in cholesterol and saturated fats. Eat a varied diet that includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products. Limit your sodium intake to 2,400 milligrams or less a day and have no more than one serving of alcohol a day if you're a woman, two if you're a man.

What Your Doctors Can Do: Screen you for high blood pressure at least every two years and more regularly if you're at risk for hypertension. Do periodic cholesterol levels for healthy men 35 or older and healthy women 45 or older. For people with additional risk factors, start younger and check more often.

Sources: American Heart Association, National Heart Lung Blood Institute, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, American College of Physicians

Lungs
What You Can Do: If you smoke, quit. If you have an underlying lung disorder, such as asthma, or are 50 or older, ask your doctor about having a flu shot every year. If you're older than 65 or have certain health conditions like heart or lung disease, AIDS, diabetes or sickle cell, consider the pneumococcal vaccine to protect against a deadly pneumonia.

What Your Doctors Can Do: If you smoke, ever smoked, have chronic respiratory distress, or are exposed to workplace irritants, you may want to undergo a simple breathing test, called spirometry, that can tell if your breathing is normal or if you may have early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.

Sources: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Lung Health Education Program

Bones
What You Can Do: Get the recommended daily amounts of calcium and vitamin D, and regularly do weight-bearing exercise. Adults ages 19 to 50 should get 1,000 mg of calcium a day, and pregnant women should have between 1,200 and 1,500 mg daily. Postmenopausal women and all adults 65 or older should consume 1,500 mgs daily. All adults should consume between 400 and 800 international units of vitamin D daily. While osteoporosis is more common in women, men are not immune.

What Your Doctor Can Do: If you are a postmenopausal woman younger than 65, with one or more osteoporosis risk factors -- such as smoking, a thin frame or a history of fractures -- have a bone mass measurement or bone mineral density test to make sure you're not at risk. All women older than 65 should undergo this test every other year.

Sources: National Osteoporosis Foundation, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, National Institutes of Health

Stomach/Colon
What You Can Do: Eat plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain foods to prevent stomach or colon cancer. Some studies suggest that folic acid and calcium also help prevent colorectal cancer, while limiting red meat consumption may lower the risk of stomach cancer.

What Your Doctor Can Do: Starting at age 50, have an annual stool blood test and/or have a flexible sigmoidoscopy every five years. Another alternative is a colonoscopy every 10 years.

Sources: American Heart Association, American Cancer Society

Sex Organs
What You Can Do: Practice safe sex.

What Your Doctor Can Do: Women in their 20s and 30s should have a clinical breast exam at least every three years. Women 40 and older should have a mammogram every 12 to 33 months. Women should be screened for cervical cancer with a Pap smear at least every three years after becoming sexually active or turning 21.

Men older than 50 should consider having a prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test and digital rectal exam annually to check for prostate cancer. Men at high risk -- blacks and those with a family history -- should consider starting at 45.

Sources: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, American Cancer Society

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[waltky]

Sometimes Uncle Ferd gets Granny's blood pressure boilin'...

Cyclical Blood Pressure Patterns Could Offer Critical Health Clues
December 12, 2012 — Cyclical patterns in our blood pressure offer clues about risks to our health, according to a medical researcher who first proposed the unorthodox idea that our bodies respond to the natural cycles of day and night, not the hours on a clock.

Although his fellow scientists scoffed at the time, 60 years later circadian rhythms, as Dr. Franz Halberg called these natural cycles, are accepted as a fundamental biological process, and their discovery made the Romanian-born physician famous. Now, Halberg is challenging medical orthodoxy again. ​ At a clinic that monitors sleeping habits, Suzi Knowles’ weekly schedule includes two day shifts and two night shifts. While she loves her job, she’s often sleepy. "The switching back and forth isn’t a good fit for anyone, I don’t think," Knowles says. "I can probably fall asleep within 20 minutes at any point.” Sleepiness isn’t the only hazard. According to Halberg, now a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, many studies indicate shift workers have a higher risk of heart disease and stroke.

Halberg says blood pressure readings could help sort out which workers are at risk and which ones are not. But he says the typical annual blood pressure reading at the doctor’s office offers too little information. “One reading can tell you that you are still alive, and that’s a good thing to know,” Halberg says. To know more, says the 93-year-old scientist, you need to measure more often. Most doctors recommend measuring a healthy person’s blood pressure at least once every year or two. Halberg checks his every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, every single day. He says these half-hour measurements, done for at least one week, provide important information about his health, including his patterns of long-term peaks and valleys and sudden spikes that seem to correspond to strain and stress.

But right now, doing this is not easy. Halberg’s own day-in, day-out monitoring device includes a blood pressure cuff, strapped around his upper arm and a pump in his trouser pocket to inflate the cuff for the blood pressure reading. After years of wearing the cumbersome contraption, he hardly notices it. “I have been wearing it now for 25 years," Halberg says. "And so did [do] a number of my associates around the world.” Dozens of scientists have sent Halberg a week’s worth of their blood pressure readings, measured every half hour. Some have done this for decades. One for nearly 50 years. “A distinguished senior professor writes that when he doesn’t have the cuff, he feels naked,” Halberg says. Halberg calls these researchers test pilots, discovering what long-term monitoring can reveal about health and natural rhythms that range from a few minutes, to months, to decades.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Prostate cancer rates set to rise...

Men's cancer risk 'to climb to one in two'
18 December 2012 - Experts are working on better tests for prostate cancer

Men look set to have a one in two chance of developing cancer in their lifetime, UK experts predict. The increase to 50 out of 100, up from the current 44 in 100 chance, is largely down to people living longer - age is the biggest cancer risk factor, says Cancer Research UK. The cancers set to increase the most in men within the next 15 years are bowel, prostate and skin (melanoma). But more will survive cancer, thanks to better screening and treatments. Medical advances mean cancer survival has already doubled in the past 40 years. And with more research, experts believe outcomes could continue to improve.

Projections

The team from the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine at Queen Mary, University of London, and Cancer Research UK reached their figures by looking at past cancer incidence and mortality rates and projected population data for the UK. They predict that by 2027 some 416,000 UK people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer compared with about 324,000 diagnosed in 2010. For men, the figure will be more than 221,000, up from 164,000 in 2010. And there will be more than 194,000 women diagnosed with cancer in 2027 compared with 160,000 in 2010 - which would mean a woman's lifetime odds of developing cancer would be 44 in 100, up from 40 in 100. Dr Harpal Kumar of Cancer Research UK said the figures provided a glimpse into the future and what challenges lie ahead. A pressing task is to find an effective way to screen for prostate cancer. Not all cancer in the prostate is aggressive or life-threatening - some people live with the condition for a lifetime without any problems.

But doctors still have no reliable test that can spot which of these tumours are safe to leave alone. Another challenge is getting men to turn up for cancer screening even when a good test for it does exist, says Alan White, chairman of the Men's Health Forum and professor of men's health at Leeds Metropolitan University. For example, although men tend to be at greater risk of developing bowel cancer than women, relatively fewer men than women go for screening for this cancer, says Prof White. "It's desperately important that men take up any opportunity to go for cancer screening that they can. "Some men are fatalistic about cancer and screening. But screening does make a difference. If cancers are spotted earlier they are easier to treat. "We also know that men who discuss screening with their doctor or their partner are more likely to take up the offer."

He said it was important for people to realise that there is a lot we can do ourselves to lower our own cancer risk, including limiting how much alcohol you drink, giving up smoking, getting enough exercise and eating a healthy diet. Experts estimate that about four in every 10 cases of cancer could be avoided in this way. In England, screening is available for bowel, breast and cervical (neck of the womb) cancer. Men can also request medical tests (a prostate specific antigen blood test) if they are concerned about prostate cancer, although these checks are less than perfect.

Source

 

[waltky]

Melanoma fights off immune system...

Skin cancer 'able to fight off body's immune system'
1 March 2013 - A deadly form of skin cancer is able to fend off the body's immune system, UK researchers have found.

Analysis of tumour and blood samples shows that melanoma knocks out the body's best immune defence. A potential test could work out which patients are likely to respond to treatment, the Journal of Clinical Investigation reports. Cancer Research UK said the body's response was a "complex puzzle".

Previous work from the team at King's College London showed that while patients with melanoma produced antibodies that could attack tumour cells, the immune system often seemed powerless to stop the cancer progressing. But in the latest research they discovered that the subtype of antibody attracted by the melanoma cells was the most ineffective at mounting the right sort of response.

In samples from 80 melanoma patients they say that the conditions created by the tumour attract IgG4 antibodies, which mount the weakest response and in turn interfere with any "strong" IgG1 antibodies that might be present. By mimicking the conditions created by melanomas, they showed that in the presence of tumour cells, the immune system sent out IgG4 antibodies, but when faced with healthy cells it functioned as expected with IgG1 circulating. They also confirmed that IgG4 was ineffective in launching an immune attack against cancer cells.

Potential test

 

[waltky]

This research links sections of the "fat gene" with obesity...

Fat gene 'linked with skin cancer'
4 March 2013 - A gene previously shown to be linked to obesity may also increase the risk of a deadly form of skin cancer, say researchers writing in Nature Genetics.

Analysis of data from 73,000 people, led by the University of Leeds, found a specific section of the "fat gene" was associated with malignant melanoma. It is the first time the gene has been linked with a specific disease independently of weight. The results suggest a wider role for the gene than originally thought. Malignant melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the UK with about 12,800 new cases and about 2,200 deaths each year. An international team analysed genetic data from the tumours of 13,000 malignant melanoma patients and 60,000 unaffected individuals. They found that those with particular variations in a stretch of DNA within the "fat gene" or FTO gene, called intron 8, could be at greater risk of developing melanoma.

New targets

Previous research linking the FTO gene with obesity found that variants in a section called intron 1 are linked with being overweight and overeating. Several other diseases have been linked to the gene but also to having a high body mass index. This is the first time that researchers have found a link between the FTO gene and a disease which is not linked to obesity and BMI. It opens up a new direction in work looking at how the gene functions as until now the focus has been on its effects on weight gain and factors such as regulating appetite.

Study author, Dr Mark Iles, a senior research fellow at the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, said: "This is the first time to our knowledge that this major obesity gene, already linked to multiple illnesses, has been linked to melanoma. "This raises the question whether future research will reveal that the gene has a role in even more diseases?" He added: "When scientists have tried to understand how the FTO gene behaves, so far they've only examined its role in metabolism and appetite. "But it's now clear we don't know enough about what this intriguing gene does."

Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK's senior science information manager, said: "These are fascinating early findings that, if confirmed in further research, could potentially provide new targets for the development of drugs to treat melanoma. "Advances in understanding more about the molecules driving skin cancer have already enabled us to develop important new skin cancer drugs that will make a real difference for patients." She added the best way to prevent melanoma was to avoid damage caused by too much sun exposure and sunbeds. "Getting a painful sunburn just once every two years can triple the risk of melanoma."

BBC News - Fat gene 'linked with skin cancer'